The Annual Meeting of the Council for Northeast Archaeology is happening in Halifax on the 18th-21st October, 2018, and ASI staff are presenting on two fascinating topics!
Eva MacDonald and David Robertson are co-presenting a paper titled A Summer to Remember: Searching for the 1847 Fever Sheds at the Toronto General Hospital. Since 2006, Eva and David have been working on uncovering the history of the Irish famine at the site of Toronto’s First Hospital, working on different parcels of land around Toronto’s busy downtown King Street. In the summer of 2018, the wooden posts for fever sheds were finally discovered, the clearest evidence yet of the presence of Irish typhus victims on the site.
In keeping with the overarching theme for this year’s conference “Technology in Archaeology,” Dr. Andrew Riddle and Dr. Katherine Hull are co-presenting a paper titled A Modest Proposal for GIS Based Data Sharing in Ontario Archaeology. This paper explores the idea of creating a GIS-based data-sharing initiative for professional archaeologists in Ontario, consisting of an open, searchable index of archaeological sites that contains basic locational, historical, and archaeological data. This initiative could be a great benefit for the dissemination of knowledge, researchers and the public.
As always, this is a fantastic conference, check out the full program here.